“I will after this is finished—I’ll demonstrate over you,” retorted Emma.
The guide made no reply, but turned back to his work. Elfreda had already disappeared from sight. Hers was a responsible post, and none knew that so well as Hamilton White himself, though Elfreda began to realize it when she found herself alone in the forest. With every sense on the alert, Elfreda devoted herself to following Mr. White’s instructions. She could catch faint whiffs of smoke from the south, but could see no fire. At first, she thought the odor was from their own backfire, but after a little she was able to distinguish a difference in the odor coming from the south. It was more pungent, more overpowering, seeming to possess more substance, more body, than did the faint smoke from the grass fire that reached her nostrils.
“I wonder if I had better run back and report? No. I will stay here until I have something definite. I may be imagining.”
Elfreda was now so far back in the forest that she could not hear the crackling of the grass backfire that Ham White had started, and she could but faintly hear the flow of Silver Creek. Soon a few scattering “snowflakes” began falling about her, and from the previous experience she knew what these meant. There was fire to the south, though it might be many miles away. Elfreda was not sufficiently familiar with forest fires to interpret these indications with certainty.
A low, rumbling noise, that might have been distant thunder, caused her to listen attentively.
“It might have been a train,” she murmured, then instantly recalled that there was no railway within fifty miles.
A breeze sprang up from the south and the tops of the trees bent under it ever so little. Then suddenly Elfreda Briggs witnessed a sight that, for the instant, paralyzed her—that prevented her from moving a muscle.
What, at first sight, looked to be a shining serpent, was wriggling toward her, now and then breathing a little spurt of smoke. The “serpent” disappeared, and she then saw others, all wriggling, twisting, turning, disappearing, and suddenly appearing in another spot a few yards away.
“Merciful heaven, what is it?” cried the Overland girl.
A little pine tree, not more than two yards in height, suddenly became the victim of one of these shining “serpents” and burst into crackling flames and was consumed in a few minutes.